I made the mistake of introducing myself to Philip Roth by reading one his later work. Indignation, a 2008 novel, drew on some of Roth’s familiar themes—Jewish identity, American identity, relationships—but it had none of the spark I was hoping for. It felt like an older man’s attempt to imagine himself back into first love. […]
There are so many ways that a story of addiction can go wrong, especially when it is narrated within a framework of fall and redemption. On one level, the stories are so similar that we feel we can trace the arc before opening the cover—the prelapsarian idyll, the first hints of trouble, the descent into […]
It’s hard to say, even 370 pages later, what the yellow house means to Sarah Broom. As a substantial structure about which to tell a story of a place, it’s not much to look at—a shotgun house in New Orleans East, ultimately ravaged by Katrina and razed to the ground. For most of the second […]
For me, it happens when I go to the Twitter feed after some recent ‘problematic’ event or statement has hit the news. Immediately the folks I have chosen to follow, ‘influencers’ among them, stoke the little fires of irritation I might have felt and before long lure me into the Twitter-sanctioned indignation I should be […]
David Bentley Hart’s book about hell, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, is brief, which is appropriate since hell is not something a Christian believes in, strictly speaking. Belief, in the creeds, is reserved for real things like a God who creates from nothing, a Christ who dies for the forgiveness of […]
It’s been another good year for this Heartlands site. The number of views has almost doubled and we have had a number of good connections with and reviews from other sites. Below you’ll find the Top 10 posts from the year along with some other notable posts in the realms of books, interviews, and poetry. […]
Suzannah Lessard’s The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape is the perfect Heartlands read. In this collection of essays, the veteran writer and observer lays bare what we have done to the land in the shift to the digital age. Lessard’s writing is beautiful and her thesis is strong–whereas the created landscapes we live in have […]
Kiese Laymon’s 2018 memoir, Heavy, made many best book lists last year. I got to it this year, partly because I understood that it was about Laymon’s struggles with his weight. It’s about a lot more than that. And Laymon’s struggles as a young, African-American man growing up in Mississippi are different than mine. With sparkling […]
This is where making this list gets hard. Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award-winning novel, Salvage the Bones, was, by far the best book I read this year. It is way too reductive to call this a Katrina novel, even though the 2005 hurricane broods over the whole story. It is a book about family, mothers, violence, […]
Kevin Powers’ historical novel, A Shout in the Ruins, had me from the first paragraph. It’s not just that he told a gripping and heart-filled novel of my home state, Virginia, in the Civil War and mid-20th century eras. It’s also that Powers is an elemental writer who uses words to explosive effect, touching on the […]
